(PRELIMINARY DRAFT OF FALL 2023 COURSE LISTINGS PACKET)
Classes are listed alphabetically according to their first department listing. For the most up-to-date listings, check the Yale Course Search website. To add or remove a course from this list, email environmentalhumanities@yale.edu.
Preliminary Draft - Last updated 3/10/23
Please note that this list may change as courses are added.
AFAM 771 (17673) / HIST 729 / AMST 830
The American Carceral State
Elizabeth Hinton
T 1:30-3:20pm
This readings course examines the historical development of the U.S. carceral state, focusing on policing practices, crime control policies, prison conditions, and the production of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century. Key works are considered to understand the connections between race and the development of legal and penal systems over time, as well as how scholars have explained the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in America. Drawing from key insights from new histories in the field of American carceral studies, we trace the multifaceted ways in which policymakers and officials at all levels of government have used criminal law, policing, and imprisonment as proxies for exerting social control in communities of color throughout U.S. history.
AFST 833 (17676) / HIST 833
Agrarian History of Africa
Robert Harms
W 9:25am-11:15am
This course examines changes in African rural life from precolonial times to the present. Issues to be examined include land use systems, rural modes of production, gender roles, markets and trade, the impact of colonialism, cash cropping, rural-urban migration, and development schemes.
ANTH 541 (18529) / ENV 836 / HIST 965 / PLSC 779
Agrarian Societies: Culture, Society, History, and Development
Jonathan Wyrtzen and Marcela Echeverri Munoz
W 1:30-3:20pm
An interdisciplinary examination of agrarian societies, contemporary and historical, Western and non-Western. Major analytical perspectives from anthropology, economics, history, political science, and environmental studies are used to develop a meaning-centered and historically grounded account of the transformations of rural society. Team-taught.
ANTH 963 (17677) / HIST 963 / HSAR 841 / HSHAM 691
Topics in the Environmental Humanities
Paul Sabin and Sunil Amrith
T 5:30-7:20pm
This is the required workshop for the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities. The workshop meets six times per term to explore concepts, methods, and pedagogy in the environmental humanities, and to share student and faculty research. Each student pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities must complete both a fall term and a spring term of the workshop, but the two terms of student participation need not be consecutive. The fall term each year emphasizes key concepts and major intellectual currents. The spring term each year emphasizes pedagogy, methods, and public practice. Specific topics vary each year. Students who have previously enrolled in the course may audit the course in a subsequent year. This course does not count toward the coursework requirement in history. Open only to students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities.
ER&M 730 (18521)
Race, Migration, and Coloniality in Europe
Fatima El-Tayeb
W 1:30pm-3:20pm
Europe’s rise to global dominance is inseparable from the invention of race as a key structuring principle of modernity. Yet, despite the geographic and intellectual origin of this concept in Europe and the explicitly race-based policies of both its fascist regimes and its colonial empires, the continent often is marginal at best in discourses on race. This is particularly true for contemporary configurations, which are often closely identified with the United States as center of both structural racism and of resistance to it. Europe diverges from the US model of racialization in ways that tend to be misread, especially on the continent itself, as the absence of race as a relevant social and political category. Accordingly, most Europeans continue to believe that racial thinking has had no lasting impact on the continent, that race matters everywhere but in Europe and is brought there exclusively through non-white others, whose presence is perpetually perceived as recent, temporary, and problematically upsetting a prior non-racial normalcy. Contrary to this perception, while racial slavery and native dispossession and genocide were foundational to the United States, in Europe, the racializing of religion and colonialism fundamentally shaped and continue to shape the continental identity. Until recently, however, this history was virtually absent from public debates, official commemorations, and policy decisions. This course is devoted to exploring the numerous counter-histories challenging the dominant narrative of European “colorblindness,” among them the long history of European Roma and Sinti, the racialization of Muslims, the mainstreaming of white supremacy and the ongoing “refugee crisis,” European economic neocolonialism in Africa, anti-Blackness and the legacies of slavery and colonialism, the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism, and strategies of resistance by racialized communities.
HIST 883 (17659)
Urban Japan Workshop: Cities and Society, c. 1500–2000
Daniel Botsman
W 1:30pm-3:20pm
Japan is not only home to the largest and, by some measures, most livable, city in the world today, but also it boasts one of the richest archives for the study of urban history. The Urban Japan Workshop offers graduate students and advanced undergraduates the opportunity to explore the rich scholarly literature on Japanese cities across time, while also developing their own individual research projects.